parser error

[Vangelis forthnet]

 On Fri Nov 3 12:19:35 GMT 2017, RS wrote:

> but is seems more likely that the BBC
> would respond to something causing an error
> in the iPlayer. The BBC does correct errors.

 Hi Richard :-)

by opening
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/subtitles/ng/modav/bUnknown-5df25dc8-d38f-43e5-93a2-38b6c778f852_b09c79wx_1509625417009.xml
one can read:

> Created on 2/11/2017 at 12:23:23

so this was just fixed at noon yesterday
(most recent Suspicion repeat aired on
22/10/2017 at 13:30; so it took them eleven days
to identify and remedy the problem)...
I have no doubt an iPlayer user did alert them; however,
this is not mentioned as a "Recently Fixed Fault" at:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/help/programme-availability/programme-issues

> What is more interesting is that neither the file you refer to
> nor the captions file it links to (URI snipped) are XML files.

... Well, I'm a complete dunce with regards to XML structure,
but when I see an .xml extension in the URI, I "assume" it points
to an ".xml" file... FWIW, the "belisage" article you referenced says

> the existing XML standard for timed text, TTML

This then got me to
https://www.w3.org/TR/ttml1/#content-attribute-id
https://www.w3.org/TR/2005/REC-xml-id-20050909/
https://www.w3.org/TR/ttml1/#content-attribute-lang
https://www.w3.org/TR/ttml1/#content-attribute-space

When viewed in Firefox, as you said

> The captions file begins
> -<tt ttp:timeBase="media" xml:lang="en">

so xml:lang does imply it's an XML subset...
Of course, Ralph came to the rescue for both
of us, as fetching the file on disk and viewing
it with an editor (BTW, I use PSPad), I do see
first lines being

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<tt xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2006/10/ttaf1" 
xmlns:ttp="http://www.w3.org/2006/10/ttaf1#parameter"

and it's those bits that Fx omits ;-(

> where - is a dash character I can't copy.
> Other <media> tags are preceded
> by a similar dash character.

 This "dash" character you are referring to
is not actually present inside the XML files,
but it's added by Fx; by clicking it, you can
collapse/expand content between matching tags;
clicking turns it into a plus sign and the XML
element's content gets hidden:

-<metadata><ttm:title>
        SUSPICION - BRD000000
      </ttm:title><ttm:copyright>
        Ericsson 2017
      </ttm:copyright>
 </metadata>

turns into

+<metadata></metadata>

As you can infer, default behaviour
is the expanded state...

Kindest regards,
Vangelis.